Hi there, new DT Pro user here I’ve read a great deal of posts on this forum, searched the web and watched some YouTube videos but I still struggle to figure out how to use DT, and, most of all, how to integrate its usage with other apps, to best suit my needs.
I’m an academic, currently working on my PhD but also on some other academic papers. I’m looking for a simple workflow and I think I know exactly what I need, I’m just not quite sure how to make it all work. I use MacBookPro, where all my writing and searching for information sources is done, and iPad Pro, where I read, highlight and annotate my PDFs (which usually are the scientific papers I then want to cite in my own dissertation). Then, ideally, my workflow would include extracting the highlighted parts of the PDFs to save them for later and play around with them. And then of course writing based on my notes Up until now I just manually copied parts of articles I wanted to cite in my own writing and pasted them into Word document where I organized them thematically and then used them for my own writing. With a project as big as a dissertation, that is not an effective way of working anymore (if it ever was). I need to automate things, but on the other hand I’m not the most tech-fluent person and I don’t desire to be: while I understand I’ll need to learn a great deal about the tools I’m trying to use, I don’t aim at creating a perfect system with all the bells and whistles. Good enough and simple is all I need.
That said, I was thinking about the following apps for different stages of my workflow, but the more I learn about these things, the more confused I am:
- DEVONthink Pro to organize and store (?) all my resources, mainly PDFs with scientific papers and books on my Mac, and DEVONthink to go to access them on my iPad.
- DEVONagent for advanced searches.
- PDF Expert for my iPad to read and annotate the PDFs - I already use it and it does a good enough job with annotating, I’m just not sure how well will it integrate in the next steps of the workflow.
- Obsidian for creating notes out of extracted PDFs annotations – both “atomic notes” and thematically organized longer notes consisting of multiple atomic notes. I know you can make notes in DT too but I just thought I would feel better if my notes weren’t mixed with my source PDF files.
- Scrinever for writing – using my thematically organized “summation” notes from Obsidian as a foundation for developing chapters.
- MS Word for editing.
- Zotero for citations.
My questions:
- I want my MacBook and iPad DT databases to be synced. I’ve read the iCloud is not ideal for that. Is syncing via Bonjour appropriate in my case? And is it better to store my files in the DT or on my Macbook’s hard drive and index them in DT in case of this particular conjunction of apps? I want PDF files to be accessible via DT both on Macbook and iPad but I also want them to be linked with Obsidian notes and for Zotero to use them as citation sources.
- I know I can open PDF files I access from DT to go in PDF Expert on my iPad but I don’t know what to do with them once I’m done annotating. I mean, where do I store annotated files? I want them to be accessible via my DT, so I want the original “clean” PDF file to be replaced by the annotated one. How is it possible when the reading and annotating is done on my iPad? It would perhaps be easier if the main storage repository for my files was an iCloud. But if the iCloud syncing is unstable and I want my files to be stored on my MacBook, what is an easy way to automatically make them “go” there from my PDF Expert on an iPad?
- I’m not sure how to link to source PDF files in DT while making a note in Obsidian. I know there are some YT videos on the topic so I’ll probably figure it out, but any recommendations are highly appreciated!
- Same goes for throwing Zotero in the mix.
I know that’s A LOT to unpack. I appreciate anyone reading and trying to help even with just one bit of an information. Any tutorials, blog posts or forum discussions recommendations are welcome (though I feel like I read this forum end to end lol). Thanks!